Blogging basics-Adding Tables

By now, you must have got a lot of idea about blogging. Blogging is not just about putting together your thoughts and publishing it all online. It’s a lot more than that. Especially, when you have plans to and you aspire to be read by people, you need to take this quite seriously. A lot of times, a blogpost required you to add some data to make certain things clearer to your readers, more importantly, adding a pinch of genuinity to what you have written. Adding some data to support your writeup does wonders (given that the data that you have added is correct). A general rule of thumb one should always follow is to quote the source of text, if you are using any external data, while using such data in your blogs. This allows the readers to check out the data source themselves, if they would want to, further adding to your trustworthiness.

Now, the problem arises when you are required to add such data in your blogs. By default, most of the blogging platforms, including some of the most popular platforms like WordPress and Blogger do not have a native support for adding tables to a blogpost. By native support, we mean to say that neither WordPress nor blogger gives you-the user, an option to add a table at the click of a button. This means either you have to add a plugin in WordPress to be able to add a table and display the data in a tabular form, or you do this by inserting HTML code for table with all the data in it. Now, the question is, for a regular user who is not very comfortable with HTML and stuff, which, most of the blogging community is initially is not, what would they do? Even, for experienced users who are pretty much comfortable with HTML markups and codes, adding a table by the means of code is a daunting task which becomes a pain if the data to be displayed is large. Thus for everyone, there has to be a workaround for this daunting task of adding tabular data in blogposts.

So, for everyone who, at some point in time or the other felt the need to display some tabular data in their blogs, and ended up doing that in either a crude form, by the help of an image, or using MS Excel or some other spreadsheet application. Now the problem in using a spreadsheet application to make your table and then use it in the form of HTML code is the fact that when converted to HTML, any data coming from MS office applications have tonnes of unnecessary code that makes your blogpost a bigger html file to load on a computer, and thus makes your blog slow. To get this done easily with a little effort, we are here with a pretty easy and faster solution. Tableizer! If you follow this blog, you probably might recall us telling you about Tableizer, among some other tools useful in blogging in a previous post.

Tableizer Home page

How to use it? It’s pretty easy. All you have do is, prepare your table on a spreadsheet application like MS Excel, copy it from there and paste it all here in the box provided on the tableizer page. Post that, you can setup a few options like Font Size, Colour of the table header i.e. the first row of the table which usually holds all the column names, and fonts names to be used in the CSS style for the table. You can alternatively tell tableizer not to use any CSS styles for the table by checking the No CSS Styles checkbox. Once you are done, Tableize It! and you will get the HTML code to be added to your blogpost which, when rendered will be displayed as a properly formatted table with all the data in it. To help you go through this easily, here we are demonstrating the steps.

Prepare your data table in MS Excel or any other spreadsheet program you like.

Tabular Data in MS Excel

Once the data is ready in the spreadsheet application, copy it from there and paste it in the box provided in the tableizer page. You can set up the options to customize the look and feel of the table.

Tableizer in Action

Once everything is done, you have to click the button Tableize it! and it’s done. You will get the HTML code of the table and a visual display of the table that is created.

The Tableizer Output

Once you are satisfied with the result, you can copy the HTML code shown in the above screenshot. You will need to paste this code in your blogger blog’s HTML section of your blogpost. The same result can be achieved by placing the HTML code in the Text section in WordPress while writing a blogpost.

Table code in blogger blogpost

Save and publish the blogpost, and you will get the desired table in the blogpost with all the formatting displayed as was expected.

Blogpost with added table

So, with this, we conclude this small post to help you add a table in your blogposts, with ease, without wasting too much time in formatting everything from top to bottom, and then pulling out your hair in frustration when it doesn’t work the way you wanted. Do let us know if you find this post helpful, and also, in case you know better ways to add tables in blogposts, afterall, we all are here to share knowledge with each other.